The today and tomorrow of kids: Time preferences and educational outcomes of children Academic Article

abstract

• We experimentally investigate the distribution of children's time preferences along gender and racial lines. We find that boys are more impatient than girls and black children are more impatient than white children. Black boys have the highest discount rates of all groups. Most importantly, we show that impatience has a direct correlation with behavior that is predictive of economic success. An increase of one standard deviation in the discount rate is associated with an increase in the number of disciplinary referrals that a child has the following school year by 14%. Our results suggest that impatience might play an important role in determining the success of performance incentive programs for school children. 2011 Elsevier B.V.

authors

• Castillo, Marco
• Petrie, Ragan

published proceedings

• JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS

altmetric score

• 8.5

author list (cited authors)

• Castillo, M., Ferraro, P. J., Jordan, J. L., & Petrie, R.

citation count

• 140

publication date

• December 2011

publisher

• Elsevier  Publisher

keywords

• Children
• Discount Rate
• Economic Experiments
• Educational Outcomes
• Patience
• Time Preferences

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2011.07.009

start page

• 1377

end page

• 1385

volume

• 95

issue

• 11-12

URL

• http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1016%2Fj.jpubeco.2011.07.009